The story opens with Bob Dylan singing With God on Our Side …”Oh my name it ain’t nothin’, my age it means less; country I come from is called the Midwest”.

Denton’s family nickname is “Mogie”. “He’s a right little mogul, the way he rules our lives”, says dad of his infant son. Young Denton loves history, is proud of America and its heroes, and hates “Reds”.

It is 1964 and Mogie is restless. He wants to do his bit. So he runs away from home for four months returning only when until his folks consent to him joining up before he turned 18.

He enlists in March 1965.

Eager for combat, he wants to be a paratrooper and is delighted when he is able to join the celebrated 101 Airborne, the famous “screaming eagles” who had led the way on D Day back in another war. 

Posted to a support unit, he is disappointed, writing home that he “felt no sense of accomplishment whilst one’s friends are facing all the dangers”.

He finally gets reassigned to a combat unit at Qan Duc on the Cambodian border.

May 11 1966. Paul Simon sings The Sound  of Silence.

Denton’s buddy is mortally wounded beside him. He carries his dying friend from the battlefield, earning an Army Commendation Medal.

He’s in the field and at the sharp end, hoping he’ll be taken off the line. He writes home: “I was religious for a while, sending out various and sundry prayers mainly concerned with staying alive. But I am once again an atheist – until the shooting starts”.

Hopes of withdrawal are an idle dream.

It is his 19th birthday, June 3rd 1966, nighttime, “in country”, on the Cambodian border, and yet another operation.

His unit is ordered to climb to the crest of a hill overlooking a besieged ARVN (South Vietnam Army) outpost to organise artillery support for the morning’s offensive.

Mogie is the point man. Out of the darkness, a Vietcong machine gun opens up.

Denton Crocker Junior never made it to the top the hill.

Back home, officers come to the door. His mother recalls: “it was just lovely day to be out in our garden”, in Saratoga Springs, New Jersey.

Bob Dylan sings “One to many mornings and a thousand miles behind”.

“Our children are really only on loan to us”, says his mother, who by the end of 1965 was already having doubts about what America was doing in Vietnam – she was well aware of the politics and the protests in South Vietnam and in the US.

But she never let on, least of all to Mogie.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning. we will remember them.

For more in In That Howling Infinite with regard to the ‘sixties:

Things fall apart – the centre cannot hold ; Springtime in Paris – remembering May 1968; Encounters with Enoch; Recalling the Mersey Poets; The Strange Death of Sam Cooke; Looking for Lehrer; Shock of the Old – the glory days of prog rock; Window on a Gone World; Back in the day; and, The Incorrigible Optimists Club.